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What is a Magazine?

There’s been a lot of talk on Sparksheet about what it means to be a magazine in the digital age. Are magazines brands, virtual communities, leisure items or just collections of words and pictures on glossy paper? Tell us what you think.

We know where “Mr. Magazine” stands. Samir Husni, whom we interviewed in September, thinks magazines are inextricably linked to print:

I don’t think there’s anything yet online that replicates that immersion experience you get with print […] We collect magazines, hoard them, put them on our coffee tables. They can be a conversation starter, a relationship starter. When you’re online you have to bend forward, look at a screen, touch, click, search. But with print you lean backward, hold it in your hand – the magazine experience comes from inside the pages toward you.

For Husni, magazine reading is a solitary experience better suited to the comfort of your living room than the social web of the Internet. While magazines may attract like-minded people, he thinks the content is enough to make people feel connected:

I don’t think readers want to get together. I think they get satisfaction from being part of a community, yet acting on their own. The way we use magazines and interact with them is completely different from the way we use and interact with the Internet…In this case, readers connect through the pages of the magazine.

Not everyone agrees. Earlier this week we spoke to author, blogger, and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, who thinks the best asset magazine brands have is their subscription base:

Magazine readers are smart and brands have an advantage because they have a community already. Brands have to figure out how to mobilize and enable that community to do what they want to do.

Media scholar Susan Currie Sivek, whom we spoke to in March, specializes in magazine communities. She thinks a publication’s form is irrelevant, whether it’s print, online, mobile, or social media. For Sivek, magazines are fundamentally linked to our personal identity:

Certainly we have to move beyond the idea of the magazine as this printed and bound thing that’s on the newsstand or that comes in the mail. Fundamentally, if you’re reading a magazine, you’re reading it to be immersed in content that speaks to a part of your personal identity. I think that if you listed off all of my magazine subscriptions you’d get a pretty good idea of what I’m all about.

The New Yorker’s Web editor sees it both ways. Last month, Blake Eskin told us that The New Yorker’s print edition is “a meditative experience,” while the Web is “fundamentally a distracted experience.” But Eskin believes that a magazine brand can be extended into the digital space in complementary, and non-contradictory ways:

Some of it is a generational question. For a 55-year-old reader, the idea that someone might both be interested in reading a 15,000-word piece about a shooting in Zambia and also be an active user of Foursquare is kind of anathema. But there are a lot of 25-year-olds who don’t see a contradiction between those things.

About the Author

Dan Levy is the Content Strategist at Unbounce and the former Editor of Sparksheet. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from Boston University and worked as a research assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, where he studied and scribbled about online media. Follow him on Twitter @danjl

If the question had been, “what is a book”? it would be easy: The word “book” refers to the words. The physical object as we’ve known it for many centuries is called “codex.” (I love Wikipedia for times like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex

Is it being a dinosaur to believe there should be name for the physical, printed magazine that is separate from the digital reproduction of it? If so, we need a word like “codex” to describe the physical magazine. (I’d be surprised in there’s not a German word for it.)

I agree that magazines are read by people who share a passion — but they may not always want to congregate to express that passion — so it’s a bit over-reaching to call magazines a “community.” .That said, I have evangelized for nearly two decades the use of a series of new technology to facilitate the gathering of such communities of shared passions.

I believe there are unique properties of the printed magazine that can be replicated, but not reproduced, in a digital form. (Or perhaps they can be replicated, but not reproduced.)

That I don’t like the word “magazine” being used to describe equally the print medium and the “e-magazine” digital medium is not a sign that I’m a dinosaur — (I can’t speak for Samir, however). I believe it’s a sign that I am influenced by the writings of Mcluhan who suggests that we media-types, when introduced to new mediums, typically go through periods during which we try to use it to replicate the old.

I am an advocate of using new technology to do things we could never do with magazines.

The book is an idea expressed in words which can be delivered to the reader either as a traditionally published book, as a print out, or as an e-book. The delivery method of the book does not matter so much as long as the reader reads the book and the idea expressed by the author is passed to him/her…

But I think what is really important in our modern world is how you interacted with the content (book), and whether you were able to share your thoughts with other like minded people around the world… Modern technology unites us and makes it easier to share the conent you like…

Here is a really good quote about books:

“Every book has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.” – ‘The Angel’s Game’

Does the definition really matter? As a media utilitarian, (I first called myself holistic, then agnostic but now utilitarian), I think of magazines as an information and marketing service with lots of subsets of customers with a variety of needs. I have found all sorts of profitable ways to address those needs including books, conferences, broadcasts, webinars, database services, newsletters, etc. etc. To me the definition of magazine seems like a rather useless question. In any particular case, the question is “what works and what sells.”

It sounds to me like you see magazines as brands. That is, media umbrellas that can encompass any number of properties, including websites, events, print publications, etc. Take the New Yorker, for instance, with its annual festivals, speaker series, book collections (Gladwell’s “What the Dog Saw”), and now podcasts and blogs. To riff on your phrasing: “unique content, in whatever form, that sells.”

I think magazine is a collection of edited content arranged around cetain theme and being published/produced in ceratin intervals (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly etc)… This type of content or ‘magazine’ can be produced in an offline or online format… The difference is just in production, work flow, editing and time frames, communications…

Print is more rigid and does not allow much ‘interaction’ either with publishers or with the community, which is fine… some people prefer to consume information in a ‘solitary’ way without sharing their thoughts with others…

Digital is more flexible and interactive… you tend to interact with the content and with the community rather than with ‘pages of the mag’…again all depends on what you like…

For example, the above artilce/post is a digital content and we are right now interacting with it and with each other by voting and sharing our ideas and thoughts for everyone else to see… This would not be possible in a print version of the article (even if you wanted to express your opinion you would need to write a letter to the editor and wait for the reply which might come or not. Or you would need to find another person who read it offline and discuss it with him/her… but what if there is no one really around who reads the same mags as you do? Then it is very much ‘solitary’ hobby…

The voting should have allowed for “None of the above” and “All of the above.” And perhaps the third option might have been expressed without adjectives, and therefore without bias. Traditionally, magazines are indeed words and pictures on paper but the words are not always pretty and the paper is not always glossy, with all that those qualifiers imply. A magazine is not a dinosaur, but it is all your other options and a whole lot more. Husni is right that a magazine is a private (even intimate) experience. A print magazine, moreover, truly is private, leaving no digital fingerprints for data-mining marketers or whomever else might be following us.

Posters on this topic who take the view that content is content no matter how it is delivered may want to know of the other ancient or recent crafts besides writing, illustrating, photography, etc. that cross platforms. The print magazine (and book) also require the centuries-old crafts of paper making, printing and binding that underpin the production of an inviting, reassuring physical object. Magazines may be recycled but many are saved and stored. Books go to the bookshelf or the library. Old computers at best are recycled into new computers, or they go to the garbage dump, where they cause environmental havoc. The content goes with them. If the content platforms are neutral, why is the age of the computer also the age of morbid obesity?